BEFORE: All right, so I've got a plan for the summer - October 1 is just 80 films away if I put my new plan into motion. Add 26 horror films to that total, and then 21 more films gets me to Christmas, believe it or not. But the tricky part for me is stretching out 80 films over the next 100 days, that's 20 days of down time. How many films should I watch in July, how many in August? Will I be busier in September than in the other two months? It's hard to predict. Should I do 25/25/20 over the next 3 months?
For now, I'm going to focus on the outstanding DC Comics-based films, then I'm going to start on the Marvel Comics-based films I haven't seen. Henry Cavill carries over from "Enola Holmes 2".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" (Movie #4,452)
THE PLOT: Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods - and imprisoned just as quickly - Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.
AFTER: Gonna issue another SPOILER ALERT tonight because this film was in theaters back in October of last year, and it just hit cable like last month, so I guess it's still considered new? New-ish? Well, regardless I've already given away the cameo at the end, but stop reading if you don't want to learn all of this movie's secrets and my complaints about them.
It's not that surprising that I don't know very much about this superhero Black Adam. Or is he a villain in the comics? See, that's how little I know about him - the only DC comics I read are the Batman books, the Superman books, and then the Justice League, only I don't stay current on that last one, I buy the trade paperbacks which get released a year or two after the comics, and they bundle 7 or 8 comics together in a story arc. This means I'm not usually up on the big company "crossover" events like "Dark Nights: Death Metal" or "Blackest Night" unless it affects those characters I read about regularly, or if the story crosses over into Justice League books. So I think Black Adam comes from somewhere in the Shazam! (Captain Marvel) world but I wasn't exactly sure where.
This means I don't read Justice Society, either - I have watched some of the "Titans" TV show, but only what's been on TV, not on HBO Max. But Justice Society is way outside of what I read - I know a bit about Hawkman, not a lot, and I know almost nothing about Dr. Fate. So I'm way outside of my comfort zone, but I was willing to give this movie a try.
Yeah, I still don't quite get it. I guess he's a villain, or more correctly, an anti-hero and we have to allow that every villain maybe thinks of themselves as the hero of their own story? Like Lex Luthor probably thinks of himself as a hero who's trying to rid the world of Superman, who he sees as an alien invader. The Joker's probably an exception because he's, well, crazy, but some of Batman's other villains maybe see themselves as heroes, like Poison Ivy's sometimes fighting to protect the environment and Catwoman's trying to bring down the system by stealing jewels? I don't know, sometimes a villain is just a villain and the writers try to make things more complicated than they are.
They teased Black Adam in the first "Shazam!" movie, and the wizard in that film is seen here, he was part of the council of wizards that granted Black Adam his powers back in ancient Egypt, to be their champion and battle a rogue pharaoh who had allied with demons or something. You can see that Black Adam's costume is like a darker version of Shazam's, but the same design - and he gets his powers from 6 Egyptian gods and heroes whose initials also spell S-H-A-Z-A-M, they're just not the Greek gods and heroes. (For the record, Khandaq is a fictional North African country, one that must be close to Egypt, but is not Egypt.)
The movie here departs from the comics a bit (as far as I can tell) by saying that back in ancient Egypt, the Council of Wizards originally chose Black Adam's son, Hurut, to be their champion - this would have been in line with their later choice of Billy Batson, choosing a young, innocent but maybe troubled teen to have all the powers of an adult superhero - maybe because for children and teens it's easier to understand the concepts of "good" and "evil" before the adult world makes things very confusing? IDK. Anyway, Hurut gave the powers to his father, Teth-Adam, to save his life, but then Hurut got killed shortly after that. (We learn all this in a set of flashbacks that maddeningly takes almost the whole film to reveal...). Teth-Adam became Black Adam, fought the evil pharaoh and then got placed in a tomb/prison for 5,000 years.
In the present, Black Adam is awoken by an archaeologist who reads the inscription on the Crown of Sabacc, just before she and her team are ambushed by Intergang, a criminal organization that's taken over most of the country of Khandaq. Adam, easily bests the Intergang members and takes out their trucks and helicopters, which brings him to the attention of Amanda Waller, who runs Project X (as seen in the "Suicide Squad" movies). She sends the Justice Society to stop Adam's rampage, because of some historical text they found that describes him as a killer, not a hero. But for some reason the Justice Society consists only of two veteran members (Dr. Fate and Hawkman) and two rookies (Cyclone and Atom-Smasher). Why they choose to send untrained heroes on a mission, I can't quite figure out. Like, Atom-Smasher keeps making mistakes, why is he on the team if he's not ready? And Hawkman keeps blaming him for everything, like it's his fault, but not if he hasn't been trained properly, that's your job, Hawkman, stop being a dick!
When he's called out for not being a true "hero", Black Adam surrenders to the Justice Society - but does this make any sense? He should see himself as a hero, as Khandaq's champion, why would he surrender like this, and agree to be placed in stasis? First you tell me this guy is as tough as nails and will fight to the end and never surrender, but as soon as a couple superheroes appear on the scene and say, "Hey, you're doing this wrong..." he just gives up? I'm not buying it - unless he truly believes that the world has changed in the last 5,000 years and he just doesn't think he's going to fit in with modern times. Maybe he thinks if he goes to sleep for another couple hundred years the world will change again and become more to his liking? I'm not sure that's how things work, either.
Meanwhile there's a former member of the archaeological team who manages to get his hands on that crown, and (because he's a descendant of the ancient pharaoh or something) he gets turned into a demon-powered super-villain himself named Sabbac. But if I'm being honest, he looks a LOT like the villain that was in the movie "Justice League", Steppenwolf? And both villains are similarly undistinct, they're kind of demonic, they've got horns, their powers include super-strength, growling and I don't know, bad breath? Really, the villain here in "Black Adam" is a big blank, so generic and forgettable, I guess this is so he doesn't outshine Black Adam/Dwayne Johnson? Like a great superhero film needs a great villain, not a totally forgettable one with random demon powers.
Sabbac unleashed a bunch of demons/zombies into the streets of Khandaq, but all this does is unite the populace and encourage them to rise up and take arms against the demon horde, so, well, that didn't work out very well, did it? Meanwhile, Dr. Fate realizes that the only champion who could possibly defeat Sabacc already exists, and it's Black Adam. Gee, if only they hadn't put him in suspended animation and locked him up... For a guy who can see the future, you kind of have to wonder why Dr. Fate didn't see they were going to need Black Adam to defeat the evil power. Something's just not adding up here. Dr. Fate has also been troubled with visions of his teammate Hawkman getting killed, which he then decides to prevent by sacrificing himself - or does he suddenly realize he's been reading his own visions incorrectly? This is all a bit unclear.
What is the deal with Dr. Fate, anyway? I've heard him described as a sorcerer type, a bit like DC's version of Marvel's Dr. Strange - the two comic-book companies once published an "Amalgam" crossover of their two universes and they briefly merged the two characters together as Dr. StrangeFate - much like they merged Superman and Captain America to form "Super-Solider" and Batman and Wolverine to form "Dark Claw". But that's about all I know about Dr. Fate, his power here seems to be that he can...wear a helmet? Duplicate himself? See the future? Well, he's not really good at predicting things, we've established that already - so what's his deal, then? I guess we'll never find out in this film or any other now.
Cyclone and Atom-Smasher are both fairly useless here, I guess Cyclone's the granddaughter of a hero(ine?) called Red Tornado and Atom-Smasher is the nephew of the original hero (who was also the Fonz) but they're both quite ineffectual here, they could have just made this movie without them and it wouldn't have made much difference. Geez, from what I understand there are SO many other members of the Justice Society, like Atom, Hourman, Sandman (not that one), Spectre, the original Flash, the original Green Lantern, and more recently Power Girl, Starman, Wildcat, Huntress, Black Canary, Stargirl, Mister Terrific and Doctor Mid-Nite. All that to choose from, and this movie went with two established members and two useless rookies?
I understand, though - you can't use the original Flash (Jay Garrick) without interfering with the upcoming "Flash" movie (with Barry Allen) and confusing people. The first Green Lantern (Alan Scott) was in the Justice Society, but the movie with Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) made the character box-office poison. Sandman, same problem, confusion with the Neil Gaiman character, who's got a Netflix series. And most of the others like Wildcat, Mister Terrific and Stargirl would elicit the same "Who the heck is THAT?" responses from most fans as Cyclone and Atom-Smasher probably would.
To make matters worse, the Justice Society and Justice League used to live in two different universes - yeah, DC had a metaverse before it was cool. So it was OK to have two heroes named "The Flash" or "Green Lantern" because one lived on Earth-One and was in the JSA and the other lived on Earth-Two and was in the JLA. And they talked once in a while and maybe had an intra-universe crossover once a year, followed by a softball game (No, wait, that was the East Coast/West Coast Avengers...). Fast-forward a few decades and then DC had the Crisis on Infinite Earths and killed off a bunch of heroes, then had the New 52 and brought them all back, but in 52 separate universes (because that's not confusing at ALL) and then they had "Rebirth" and started everything over from scratch again, but somehow all the universes and all the heroes who had ever been were crammed into one tiny universe. Jesus, it's like they can't keep a solid storyline going for 90 years without messing with it from time to time.
The problem is, I think, that the readers keep getting older and either dying or aging out of the comic-book purchasing lifestyle (I'm a proud rare exception) and so every few years DC (and also Marvel) has to tear the whole system down and create these "entry points" to attract new readers. DC does it about every three years now - Crisis, Zero Hour, New 52, Flashpoint, Convergence, Rebirth, and most recently Infinite Frontier and Dawn of the DCU. They're not really starting EVERYTHING over each time, but with Superman, for example, they did a storyline a few years ago where he revealed to the world that he was also Clark Kent, because he was a hero who stood for truth and justice, but he was also lying to the world by having a secret identity and getting paid to write newspaper articles about himself. So he told his truth and it worked for a while, but now in the last few months they had Luthor find a way to make everyone in the world forget his secret and he blackmailed Superman back into hiding. Really, a new writer probably got hired and just wanted things to reset so he could tell the stories he wanted to tell. That's a soft reboot, but stuff like that's going on in the comic-book world all the time.
And the DC Movie Universe is going through this now, too - James Gunn is trying to unite all the movies into a big, consistent storytelling space going forward - but this is also what they said when "Justice League" came out, that all the future movies would spin off from there and take place in one unified, consistent universe - but it didn't happen. They came out with "Joker" and "The Batman" and those are apparently set in alternate realities, and Ben Affleck is no longer Batman and the most consistent team out there is the Suicide Squad, which is a problem of its own. I think this just means that "Wonder Woman 1984" really sucked so all plans to make "Aquaman 2" and more Superman films with Henry Cavill were put on hold, which is a shame. There's still "The Flash" though, and I want to watch that film within the next two weeks, because it's going to be a sign of how the DC Movie-verse continuity is going to work going forward. But I'm afraid it also looks a lot like "Spider-Man: No Way Home", which was a total cop-out, stating that every Spider-Man movie ever really happened, just in different universes.
Nothing succeeds like success, of course, so Marvel gets to keep their movie-verse intact, more or less, and maybe even re-boot the X-Men into it somehow, while DC has to keep tearing everything down and re-building it every five years, much like the Spider-Verse. I'll check back in here after watching "The Flash", of course, but my outlook for continuity in the future isn't very good. There is a bit of hope, if the "Shazam!" movies keep doing well, because maybe both Shazam and Black Adam could appear in a Justice Society movie, and while that might be a little awkward with both of them on the same team, it could also be a little bit awesome. I think in the comics something like the events at the end of this movie did happen, with Superman coming to Black Adam because the Justice League needed his help - but I haven't read that far in "Justice League" comics, remember I wait for the trade paperbacks, and they're a year or two behind.
Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Aldis Hodge (last seen in "The Invisible Man"), Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "The Long Good Friday"), Noah Centineo (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Sarah Shahi, Quintessa Swindell (last seen in "Voyagers"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "The Promise"), Bodhi Sabongui, Mohammed Amer, James Cusati-Moyer, Jalon Christian, Odelya Halevi, Uli Latukefu (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Jennifer Holland (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Chaim Jeraffi (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Patrick Sabongui, with cameos from Viola Davis (last seen in "Air"), Djimon Hounsou (also last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Down to You").
RATING: 5 out of 10 unhelpful premonitions
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